Caffeine and Cleanliness

Balzac liked coffee. I do not say that based on original research or on my reading of primary material—i.e., Balzac's essay on coffee. I base it on an article about caffeine I read years ago. The author cited Balzac as being not just a caffeine addict but a full-fledged slave to the stimulant. Balzac wrote that caffeine marshalled and organized his brain cells, lining them up to attack whatever subject Balzac wished them to attack. He said he was incapable of writing without the brain-energizing stimulus of caffeine. The essay was full of very funny, very military comparisons.

 

So this morning, with Balzac in mind, I decided to treat my brain to a pre-writing caffeine hit. I had a large cup of full-caffeine café au lait, relying on the milk to protect my stomach. Well, that part worked. But the marshalling of my little brain cells? Not so much. My brain cells, compared to Balzac's, are new, raw, untrained recruits. When I call upon them to come to attention, they scatter and race like a gaggle of kindergartners let loose on the playground. No order is discernible. My brain cells jitter and skitter, trembling the pen in my hand so every other word I write has letters transposed or dropped. Caffeine has not helped pinpoint my thoughts, has not made my images clearer. It has done nothing, in fact, but make me need to pee much more urgently than usual.

 

So much for my noble experiment. I won't be repeating it any time soon.

 

Let me talk instead about cleanliness. I recently read, in a work of fiction, a comment by a man returning to his mother's home for tea. He noted that she had outdone herself in preparation: the house was shining, the table laid with starched linens and gleaming tea cups.

 

That shining house caught my eye. Now that our wonderful cleaner, Lorna, comes for three hours every week to do the work that I pretend I can no longer do (but that in fact I never did do), I have realized the difference between pre- and post-Lorna. It is a subtle change in the way the house looks, and it boils down to this: un-vacuumed floors develop a sheer covering of dust that the eye registers without being aware of it. After vacuuming, our entire (wood-floored) house shines.

 

I find it difficult to articulate the distinct yet almost unnoticeable difference between the two stages: clean and not-clean. I'll stop trying except to say that I'm so happy to have Lorna in my life. All my previous reluctance to hire someone to do work that I should be doing has disappeared. Have I abandoned my principles? Or is it just that I actually have become too old to do what I once could have done, if I had chosen to spend my time that way?

 

In either case, I marvel at the joy I experience when I enter my kitchen with the newly shining floor. The layer of guilt I have always carried within me (oh, I should mop the floor, I should mop the floor!) is gone. Someone else is mopping (and waxing!) the floor and I don't even have to watch it being done. My years of feeling that if only my mother had taught me how to clean my house I could deal with it—all of that is gone. Don't want to. Never wanted to. And now I don't have to.

 

Last week Lorna even helped us turn our oversized mattress, the 14-inch-deep kind deliberately designed to trap and crush unwary seniors.

 

 

Copyright 2013 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com